Suitable overarching definition for food system resilience can be debated; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) definition offers some practicality in its description, portraying resilience as “the ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions”[1] Tendall et al. (2015) offered a conceptual definition of resilience in the context of food systems as " The capacity over time of a food system and its units at multiple levels, to provide sufficient, appropriate and accessible food to all, in the face of various and even unforeseen disturbances." Latter aims to bring about the aspect of sustainability to the concept and ties it to the concept of [[food security|food security.[2]
The term resilience itself was first introduced in the area of ecology by C.S Holling in 1973.[3] It can broadly be defined as a systems ability to stand and absorb disturbances for it to stay in equilibrium or steady state. The term has developed more as a paradigm over time and borrows its concept to a vast body of disciplines and fields such as anthropology, management literature, cultural theory and human geography.[4] Thus the concept has some context dependency. For example, if a system is seen as having the potential for multiple stable states (e.g. in ecosystem ecology) or only for one (e.g. in engineering).[5]
Food systems are seen as social-ecological systems that are linked with social and biophysical interactions and factors with various feedback mechanisms in play. Food system itself includes at least food production, processing and packaging, distribution and retail, and consumption. On another level it is also dependent and involved in social, economic, political, institutional and environmental processes and dimensions.[6]
Link to SDG's
Food system reciliance has a link to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular to Zero hunger (goal 2). In the targets the need for all year round food availability is mentioned and resilient food systems help to buffer any unexpected shortages caused weather, pests etc. Also, target number 6 - water and sanitation - has its relations to the topic; protecting and restoring water related ecosystems add to these systems resilience and furthermore improve their condition to human use of food resources such as fishing or the sustainable use of water in agriculture. In this relation, goals 14 and 15 (Life below water and Life on land, respectively) are linked to the topic.
Finally, the goal of responsible consumption and production (goal 12) states that "land degradation, declining soil fertility, unsustainable water use, over fishing and marine environment degradation are all lessening the ability of the natural resource base to supply food." All of these aspects severely impact the resilience of the whole food system.[7]
Resilience in agriculture
Resilient systems increase the predictability in the long run but can be costly in the short. Industrialization such as growing the size of the farms has led to lower overall resilience in Northern American farms against e.g. to climate change.[8] Climate change buffering can be used in agriculture as an adaptive management method, for example increasing structural diversity within the fields or the landscape in order to suppress pest invasion; under climate change pests are likely to make multiple generations as also migrate to new, climatically suitable areas with no previous experience of the pest.[9] Some economically valuable crops such as rice, wheat and maize have certain heat and drought thresholds that affect the growth of the grains and have resulted in substantial losses.[10] Some farmers have turned to agroforest systems, where trees are used to stabilize the heat fluctuations or offer a physical barrier to heavy showers or storms that can also cause landslides. In Mexico the benefits of agroforests in coffee production were noted in lower number of landslides in agroforest farms.[11]
Innovations and corporate praxis
In March 2014 US president Obama announced a climate data initiative aiming to provide open access hub for government data about the impacts of climate change. Later on the same year The White house published a challenge for private sector: "The Obama Administration is renewing the President's call to America's private-sector innovators to leverage open government data and other resources to build tools that will make the U.S. and global food systems more resilient against the impacts of climate change."[12]
The private sector in the US is thus free to use the government Big Data and deliver technologies and innovations for customers. For example a company such an Agralogics mines and combines public and private data for crop managers. It provides the customer all the relevant information e.g. in regards of weather and climate, satellite images and then combines them with relevant private data for the customer to optimize its operations for example the timing of harvest.[13]
Critique
The topic of food system resilience is very multilayered and multidimensional both time and space. Just alone food system can have multiple meanings let alone to define resilience in each and one of those contexts. Foran et al. made an illustration of the complexity in food systems with an example of political actions to reduce food insecurity by e.g. invests in women’s agriculture, subsidize inorganic fertilizer, reform agricultural input markets, improve water productivity in rainfed agriculture, improve resource efficiency, participation, and accountability in water and energy systems,
strengthen common property regimes that provide high quality wild foods, help smallholders gain a better position in global food supply chains dominated by agro-food corporations; reduce food losses, liberalize trade, and invest in nutrition and health.[14] Therefore, it seems important to define the context, concept and scale when talking about food system resilience
Examples from Finland
As many high-income industrialized country, Finland has - to some extent - spatially separated the production of the food from the consumption of the food; during the last 30 years the country has doubled its import of crops and especially the kinds that could be grown in Finland, such as rapeseed.[15] In regards of food resilience, Finland, in theory, has also thus grown its dependency on other countries and their agriculture. In a case of a foreign production shock it is not however straightforward to analyse if the shock will result in a shortage of food. It will depend on domestic reserves and for example the geographical diversity of suppliers.[16]
^ ]]
Tendall, D. M., Joerin, J., Kopainsky, B., Edwards, P., Shreck, A., Le, Q. B., ... & Six, J. (2015). Food system resilience: defining the concept. Global Food Security, 6, 17-23.
^ Holling CS. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 4: 1– 23
^ Folke, C. (2006). Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social–ecological systems analyses. Global environmental change, 16(3), 253-267.
^ Gunderson, L. H. (2000). Ecological resilience—in theory and application. Annual review of ecology and systematics, 31(1), 425-439.
International Panel of Climate Change 2012
^ Tendall, D. M., Joerin, J., Kopainsky, B., Edwards, P., Shreck, A., Le, Q. B., ... & Six, J. (2015). Food system resilience: defining the concept. Global Food Security, 6, 17-23.
^ Rotz, S., & Fraser, E. D. (2015). Resilience and the industrial food system: analyzing the impacts of agricultural industrialization on food system vulnerability. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 5(3), 459-473.
^ Lin, B. B. (2011). Resilience in agriculture through crop diversification: adaptive management for environmental change. BioScience, 61(3), 183-193
^ Philpott, S. M., Lin, B. B., Jha, S., & Brines, S. J. (2008). A multi-scale assessment of hurricane impacts on agricultural landscapes based on land use and topographic features. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 128(1), 12-20.
^ Foran, T., Butler, J. R., Williams, L. J., Wanjura, W. J., Hall, A., Carter, L., & Carberry, P. S. (2014). Taking complexity in food systems seriously: an interdisciplinary analysis. World Development, 61, 85-101.
^ Sandström, V., Kauppi, P. E., Scherer, L., & Kastner, T. (2017). Linking country level food supply to global land and water use and biodiversity impacts: The case of Finland. Science of The Total Environment, 575, 33-40.
^ Marchand, P., Carr, J. A., Dell’Angelo, J., Fader, M., Gephart, J. A., Kummu, M., ... & Rulli, M. C. (2016). Reserves and trade jointly determine exposure to food supply shocks. Environmental Research Letters, 11(9), 095009.
Definition
Suitable overarching definition for food system resilience can be debated; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) definition offers some practicality in its description, portraying resilience as “the ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions”[1] Tendall et al. (2015) offered a conceptual definition of resilience in the context of food systems as " The capacity over time of a food system and its units at multiple levels, to provide sufficient, appropriate and accessible food to all, in the face of various and even unforeseen disturbances." Latter aims to bring about the aspect of sustainability to the concept and ties it to the concept of [[food security|food security.[2]
The term resilience itself was first introduced in the area of ecology by C.S Holling in 1973.[3] It can broadly be defined as a systems ability to stand and absorb disturbances for it to stay in equilibrium or steady state. The term has developed more as a paradigm over time and borrows its concept to a vast body of disciplines and fields such as anthropology, management literature, cultural theory and human geography.[4] Thus the concept has some context dependency. For example, if a system is seen as having the potential for multiple stable states (e.g. in ecosystem ecology) or only for one (e.g. in engineering).[5]
Food systems are seen as social-ecological systems that are linked with social and biophysical interactions and factors with various feedback mechanisms in play. Food system itself includes at least food production, processing and packaging, distribution and retail, and consumption. On another level it is also dependent and involved in social, economic, political, institutional and environmental processes and dimensions.[6]
Link to SDG's
Food system reciliance has a link to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular to Zero hunger (goal 2). In the targets the need for all year round food availability is mentioned and resilient food systems help to buffer any unexpected shortages caused weather, pests etc. Also, target number 6 - water and sanitation - has its relations to the topic; protecting and restoring water related ecosystems add to these systems resilience and furthermore improve their condition to human use of food resources such as fishing or the sustainable use of water in agriculture. In this relation, goals 14 and 15 (Life below water and Life on land, respectively) are linked to the topic.
Finally, the goal of responsible consumption and production (goal 12) states that "land degradation, declining soil fertility, unsustainable water use, over fishing and marine environment degradation are all lessening the ability of the natural resource base to supply food." All of these aspects severely impact the resilience of the whole food system.[7]
Resilience in agriculture
Resilient systems increase the predictability in the long run but can be costly in the short. Industrialization such as growing the size of the farms has led to lower overall resilience in Northern American farms against e.g. to climate change.[8] Climate change buffering can be used in agriculture as an adaptive management method, for example increasing structural diversity within the fields or the landscape in order to suppress pest invasion; under climate change pests are likely to make multiple generations as also migrate to new, climatically suitable areas with no previous experience of the pest.[9] Some economically valuable crops such as rice, wheat and maize have certain heat and drought thresholds that affect the growth of the grains and have resulted in substantial losses.[10] Some farmers have turned to agroforest systems, where trees are used to stabilize the heat fluctuations or offer a physical barrier to heavy showers or storms that can also cause landslides. In Mexico the benefits of agroforests in coffee production were noted in lower number of landslides in agroforest farms.[11]
Innovations and corporate praxis
In March 2014 US president Obama announced a climate data initiative aiming to provide open access hub for government data about the impacts of climate change. Later on the same year The White house published a challenge for private sector: "The Obama Administration is renewing the President's call to America's private-sector innovators to leverage open government data and other resources to build tools that will make the U.S. and global food systems more resilient against the impacts of climate change."[12]
The private sector in the US is thus free to use the government Big Data and deliver technologies and innovations for customers. For example a company such an Agralogics mines and combines public and private data for crop managers. It provides the customer all the relevant information e.g. in regards of weather and climate, satellite images and then combines them with relevant private data for the customer to optimize its operations for example the timing of harvest.[13]
Critique
The topic of food system resilience is very multilayered and multidimensional both time and space. Just alone food system can have multiple meanings let alone to define resilience in each and one of those contexts. Foran et al. made an illustration of the complexity in food systems with an example of political actions to reduce food insecurity by e.g. invests in women’s agriculture, subsidize inorganic fertilizer, reform agricultural input markets, improve water productivity in rainfed agriculture, improve resource efficiency, participation, and accountability in water and energy systems,
strengthen common property regimes that provide high quality wild foods, help smallholders gain a better position in global food supply chains dominated by agro-food corporations; reduce food losses, liberalize trade, and invest in nutrition and health.[14] Therefore, it seems important to define the context, concept and scale when talking about food system resilience
Examples from Finland
As many high-income industrialized country, Finland has - to some extent - spatially separated the production of the food from the consumption of the food; during the last 30 years the country has doubled its import of crops and especially the kinds that could be grown in Finland, such as rapeseed.[15] In regards of food resilience, Finland, in theory, has also thus grown its dependency on other countries and their agriculture. In a case of a foreign production shock it is not however straightforward to analyse if the shock will result in a shortage of food. It will depend on domestic reserves and for example the geographical diversity of suppliers.[16]
Tendall, D. M., Joerin, J., Kopainsky, B., Edwards, P., Shreck, A., Le, Q. B., ... & Six, J. (2015). Food system resilience: defining the concept. Global Food Security, 6, 17-23.
International Panel of Climate Change 2012